Ross' Deontic Paradox
Imperative logic is the field of logic concerned with imperatives. In contrast to declaratives, it is not clear whether imperatives denote propositions or more generally what role truth and falsity play in their semantics. Thus, there is almost no consensus on any aspect of imperative logic. Jørgensen's dilemma One of a logic's principal concerns is logical validity. It seems that arguments with imperatives can be valid. Consider: :P1. Take all the books off the table! :P2. ''Foundations of Arithmetic'' is on the table. :C1. Therefore, take ''Foundations of Arithmetic'' off the table! However, an argument is valid if the conclusion follows from the premises. This means the premises give us reason to believe the conclusion, or, alternatively, the truth of the premises determines truth of the conclusion. Since imperatives are neither true nor false and since they are not proper objects of belief, none of the standard accounts of logical validity apply to arguments containing impe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises in a topic-neutral way. When used as a countable noun, the term "a logic" refers to a logical formal system that articulates a proof system. Formal logic contrasts with informal logic, which is associated with informal fallacies, critical thinking, and argumentation theory. While there is no general agreement on how formal and informal logic are to be distinguished, one prominent approach associates their difference with whether the studied arguments are expressed in formal or informal languages. Logic plays a central role in multiple fields, such as philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics. Logic studies arguments, which consist of a set of premises together with a conclusion. Premises and conclusions are usually un ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Domain Of Discourse
In the formal sciences, the domain of discourse, also called the universe of discourse, universal set, or simply universe, is the set of entities over which certain variables of interest in some formal treatment may range. Overview The domain of discourse is usually identified in the preliminaries, so that there is no need in the further treatment to specify each time the range of the relevant variables. Many logicians distinguish, sometimes only tacitly, between the ''domain of a science'' and the ''universe of discourse of a formalization of the science''.José Miguel Sagüillo, Domains of sciences, universe of discourse, and omega arguments, History and philosophy of logic, vol. 20 (1999), pp. 267–280. Examples For example, in an interpretation of first-order logic, the domain of discourse is the set of individuals over which the quantifiers range. A proposition such as is ambiguous, if no domain of discourse has been identified. In one interpretation, the domain of di ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Héctor-Neri Castañeda
Héctor-Neri Castañeda (December 13, 1924 – September 7, 1991) was a Guatemalan-American philosopher and founder of the journal ''Noûs''. Biography Born in San Vicente, Zacapa, Guatemala, he emigrated to the United States in 1948 and studied under Wilfrid Sellars at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a B.A. in 1950 and M.A. in 1952. Castañeda received his Ph.D. in June 1954 from the University of Minnesota for his dissertation ''The Logical Structure of Moral Reasoning''. Sellars served as his doctoral advisor. He studied at Oxford University from 1955–1956, after which he once again returned to the U.S. to take a sabbatical-replacement position in philosophy at Duke University. Castañeda is noted for his development of guise theory, which he applied to outstanding problems in the analysis of thought, language, and the structure of the world. He is also credited with the discovery of the " quasi-indexical". He died of a brain tumor in 1991. Academic career ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Temporal Logic
In logic, temporal logic is any system of rules and symbolism for representing, and reasoning about, propositions qualified in terms of time (for example, "I am ''always'' hungry", "I will ''eventually'' be hungry", or "I will be hungry ''until'' I eat something"). It is sometimes also used to refer to tense logic, a modal logic-based system of temporal logic introduced by Arthur Prior in the late 1950s, with important contributions by Hans Kamp. It has been further developed by computer scientists, notably Amir Pnueli, and logicians. Temporal logic has found an important application in formal verification, where it is used to state requirements of hardware or software systems. For instance, one may wish to say that ''whenever'' a request is made, access to a resource is ''eventually'' granted, but it is ''never'' granted to two requestors simultaneously. Such a statement can conveniently be expressed in a temporal logic. Motivation Consider the statement "I am hungry". Though its ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation,Mey, Jacob L. (1993) ''Pragmatics: An Introduction''. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001). as well as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures, principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called ''pragmatic competence''. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice. Origin of the field Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist l ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Speech Act
In the philosophy of language and linguistics, speech act is something expressed by an individual that not only presents information but performs an action as well. For example, the phrase "I would like the kimchi; could you please pass it to me?" is considered a speech act as it expresses the speaker's desire to acquire the kimchi, as well as presenting a request that someone pass the kimchi to them. According to Kent Bach, "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". The contemporary use of the term goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Speech acts serve their function once they are said or communicated. These are commonly taken to include acts s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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List Of Paradoxes
This list includes well known paradoxes, grouped thematically. The grouping is approximate, as paradoxes may fit into more than one category. This list collects only scenarios that have been called a paradox by at least one source and have their own article in this encyclopedia. Although considered paradoxes, some of these are simply based on fallacious reasoning ( falsidical), or an unintuitive solution (veridical). Informally, the term ''paradox'' is often used to describe a counter-intuitive result. However, some of these paradoxes qualify to fit into the mainstream perception of a paradox, which is a self-contradictory result gained even while properly applying accepted ways of reasoning. These paradoxes, often called ''antinomy,'' point out genuine problems in our understanding of the ideas of truth and description. Logic * : The supposition that, 'if one of two simultaneous assumptions leads to a contradiction, the other assumption is also disproved' leads to paradoxical ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Free Choice Inference
Free choice is a phenomenon in natural language where a linguistic disjunction appears to receive a logical conjunctive interpretation when it interacts with a modal operator. For example, the following English sentences can be interpreted to mean that the addressee can watch a movie ''AND'' that they can also play video games, depending on their preference: # You can watch a movie OR play video games. # You can watch a movie OR you can play video games. Free choice inferences are a major topic of research in formal semantics and philosophical logic because they are not valid in classical systems of modal logic. If they were valid, then the semantics of natural language would validate the ''Free Choice Principle''. # ''Free Choice Principle'': (\Diamond P \lor \Diamond Q) \rightarrow (\Diamond P \land \Diamond Q) This symbolic logic formula above is not valid in classical modal logic: Adding this principle as an axiom to standard modal logics would allow one to conclude \Di ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Metaethics
In metaphilosophy and ethics, meta-ethics is the study of the nature, scope, and meaning of moral judgment. It is one of the three branches of ethics generally studied by philosophers, the others being normative ethics (questions of how one ought to be and act) and applied ethics (practical questions of right behavior in given, usually contentious, situations). While normative ethics addresses such questions as "What should I do?", evaluating specific practices and principles of action, meta-ethics addresses questions such as "What ''is'' goodness?" and "How can we tell what is good from what is bad?", seeking to understand the assumptions underlying normative theories. Another distinction often made is that normative ethics involves first-order or substantive questions; meta-ethics involves second-order or formal questions. Some theorists argue that a metaphysical account of morality is necessary for the proper evaluation of actual moral theories and for making practical moral d ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ethics
Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns matters of value; these fields comprise the branch of philosophy called axiology. Ethics seeks to resolve questions of human morality by defining concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime. As a field of intellectual inquiry, moral philosophy is related to the fields of moral psychology, descriptive ethics, and value theory. Three major areas of study within ethics recognized today are: # Meta-ethics, concerning the theoretical meaning and reference of moral propositions, and how their truth values (if any) can be determined; # Normative ethics, concerning the practical means of determining a moral course of action; # Applied ethics, concerning what a person is obligated (or permitted) to do ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mind (journal)
''MIND'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association. Having previously published exclusively philosophy in the analytic tradition, it now "aims to take quality to be the sole criterion of publication, with no area of philosophy, no style of philosophy, and no school of philosophy excluded." Its institutional home is shared between the University of Oxford and University College London. It is considered an important resource for studying philosophy. History and profile The journal was established in 1876 by the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain (University of Aberdeen) with his colleague and former student George Croom Robertson (University College London) as editor-in-chief. With the death of Robertson in 1891, George Stout took over the editorship and began a 'New Series'. Early on, the journal was dedicated to the question of whether psychology could be a legitimate natural science. In the first issu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré ( S: stress final syllable ; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology. Poincaré made clear the importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discove ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |